When I hear the word culture I reach for my textbook on institutional theory

How on earth does killing one king and deposing a couple of others qualify as “sucking up to the state and throne”? And as far as state authority is concerned, France is the European expert in riot as a weapon of resistance…. mostly used whenever the state tries to withdraw from public provision.

And the then Canadian government (not Conservative but Liberal) was against the New Deal while FDR was introducing it south of the border — thought it smacked of socialism. That medicare was eventually introduced in Canada rather than the US was a fluke — people (including FDR and Truman) had been pushing for it much longer in the US. The reason, according to Antonia Maioni in her book, is just that the Canadian political system, parliamentary with health care a provincial responsibility, was favourable to the reform while the US system, with powerful congressional committees, was against it. National culture, except as expressed in political institutions, had nothing to do with it.

We should think of “political culture,” in this context, as creating reference points through which individuals and groups justify policies. American political culture clearly changes the terms of justification for welfare state policies; it probably makes it more difficult to propose, pass, and implement certain policies and easier to oppose them. But there’s a lot of flexibility within American small-l liberalism, let alone the various religious strains in American culture, through which one can advocate–even successfully–redistributive and welfare policies. If Goldberg were right, we’d have a hard time understanding just how expansive the contemporary American state is across a whole range of policy arenas.

Bottom-line: political culture explains a lot, but not in a deterministic or simplistic way. It certainly doesn’t function as a quasi-deterministic variable.

And I suspect American federalism–along with a whole host of other institutional factors–explains a lot about why we don’t have a more robust national welfare state. But this isn’t my area.

Goldberg also conflates ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense with ‘political culture’ in Lipset’s sense. Much of Goldberg’s piece seems to be a bad cribbing of Fukuyama’s obituary.

France works because the Parisian bourgeoisie believe that it is run ruthlessly in their interest. The politicians they vote for do allow other groups a few symbolic victories – peasants, railwaymen, and so forth. So a friend argues; myself, I suspect that it’s all a huge book-keeping fraud.

Mr. Henry,

And here I was thinking that culture was back as an explantion, seeing as there don’t seem to be any other models still standing for third-world development – for instance.

And then there are all sorts of other areas where people seem to have gone straight back to culture – see Ogbu on education.

What do you think of Amy Chua ?

While I always benefit from reading Henry’s posts, I have to say that even one neuron devoted to the semi-literate ravings of Mr. Goldberg is a neuron wasted.

There’s plenty to disagree with in what Goldberg wrote, but Henry’s rather drastically distorted it to create a strawman. “Culture is Destiny”? Just because he says governemnt is not destiny, doesn’t mean he says that culture is. He just says it matters a lot — and he’s right.

I’m curious what, Shelby, you think Henry distorted. I freely admit that “Maybe, just maybe” is a weasel phrase, designed to allow Goldberg to disown the rest of the argument when it suits his purpose.

I found the notion that liberals refused to make cultural arguments because of (1) some lingering attachment to Marxist class analysis fascinating and (2) multiculturalism. Either might be the case, I suppose, but it also might be the case that most liberals don’t like naive culturalist arguments because, well, they’re bad arguments. Or it could have something to do with faith in universal reason. I doubt it has much to do with multiculturalism, which, after all, is premised on precisely the opposite line of reasoning: that culture is everything.

Err, Fukuyama’s obituary of Lipset.

And there I was clicking on your link, thinking that Fukuyama had gone on to the universal homogeneous state in the sky.

Wow. This has been a startlingly civilised comments thread, quite out of keeping with its source material, until lord acton weighed in, presumably ironically.

Americans are Europeans. Plus some third world folks. What do arguments based on unchanging national cultures do with that (not that either of the latter two categories are national)? Do they assume that a national consciousness, with its own unique ideas and intolerances, sprang into existence out of some potential-filled abyss one morning in 1776?

1. Why is it “a bit rich for a National Review hack to be talking smack about “long traditions of sucking-up to to the state and throne”? I find this comment completely puzzling, and I say that as someone who is familiar with NR. Henry has doubtlessly done extensive reading of NR, so perhaps he could clarify.

2. Henry says that Goldberg gets Lipset’s theory “badly wrong.” “While Lipset was keen on enduring American values, he didn’t pretend for a moment that they were the only force shaping US politics.” But Goldberg doesn’t claim that, and only a peculiar sort of intentional misreading would lead someone to claim that he does. Shelby above in 16 has it exactly right, and Henry’s response is 20 is, as expected, a restatement of his misreading, and no more persuasive the second time around. Goldberg’s post is clearly meant to respond to those who believe that “government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one.” Somehow that is converted in Henry’s misreading into a claim that only culture matters, which is not at all the point.

3. I am doubtless less familiar with the works of Marty Lipset than Henry is, but I thought Lipset claimed that it was the experience of the Great Depression which led to a “europeanization” of American culture, and that this was largely reversed in the post-war period (despite the continuing institutions of course).

4. I am confused how Goldberg’s post could be fairly understood as a “higher justification for selfishness.” Is it the implicit criticism of the American invasion of Iraq that Henry interprets as selfish? Or something else?

A clarification of what I meant by that because it kind of looked like I was calling sg a troll. “Lord Acton” ( I’m trying to think of a pun on power corrupts here but I can’t) is a troll. One of the most useful principles web based discussion of Intelligent Design creationism has taught us is that it is counterproductive to “feed the trolls”. That is respond to them in anyway. If everyone on weblogs internalized this principle things would be much better.

Henry, you nailed it. Goldberg is not an honest thinker. He is an ideologue of conservative power, of selfishness, searching as they all are right now, for a way to grab it back.

The conservative heyday is over in three different ways, and they don’t even understand it. The Reaganic formulary no longer produces the old abracadabra. The liberal Democrats are politically ascendant, mostly through sheer dumb luck. And the U.S. is cartwheeling into a future of externalities and internalities that the market system, on its own, cannot make right.

Goldberg is the worst of them and the best of them. All the conservatives are now writing this dreck. They are not searching for knowledge, they are looking for a winning ideology. They are looking for a way to regain control. And if “culture” rings the bell, they will go for it.

Goldberg’s post is clearly meant to respond to those who believe that “government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one.”

I’m going to put aside for a second whether Goldberg’s post constitutes an even semi-serious response to Ezra, and do a little bit of reconstruction of Goldberg’s argument.

You’re right that Goldberg is responding to those who would claim that “government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one…” But you’re wrong to argue that Henry caricatures Goldberg’s post, because the rest of the post suggests we look (“maybe, just maybe”) to “national culture” as the more powerful explanatory variable that governing institutions: “Sweden’s government succeeds as much as it does because it governs Sweden,” etc. etc.

Indeed, the rest of the sentence you quote is a lead in to a rather bizarre argument that African and Latin American governing institutions are somehow isomorphic with those in western Europe[*]. Hence, presumably, we need to look at national culture. Goldberg doesn’t draw that last connection explicitly, but I’m not sure what else he could be suggesting given the rest of the argument.

Anyway, I’d be thrilled to have a long conversation with a young undergraduate batting around these ideas, but that’s basically the level of Goldberg’s post and I’m not sure its worth this kind of energy on CT.

*”On paper” — a phrase that signals, even to the extent that it is right, why Goldberg needs to learn a thing or two about comparative-institutional analysis and political economy.

As bad as anyone can think that “Liberal Fascism” is going to be, it’s going to be worse.

As bad as anyone can think that “Liberal Fascism” is going to be, it’s going to be worse.

I hear it’s going to have origami pop-ups.

Henry, I realize that humor is of course a matter of taste and that Goldberg’s brand isn’t everyone’s and all that, but I think (and thought) it obvious that the particular bits you cited as the point were instead a bit of caricature. Re-reading his post, yours, and your comments, I now concede your humorlessness.

Anyone got a good answer for Goldberg’s question:

If government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one, then how come it’s so damn hard bringing third world countries into the first world? . . . What a happier place the world would be if fixing Iraq merely meant installing the most fashionable system from Europe these days, whatever that is.

Also this from Henry is plainly a misreading:

While Lipset was keen on enduring American values, he didn’t pretend for a moment that they were the only force shaping US politics.

Nor did Goldberg say anything that would lead a fair reader to that interpretation.

Well *something* should explain why the U.S. doesn’t have a more advanced welfare state, compared to most other developed nations. If it’s not culture, then what is it? I guess it could be luck or happenstance.

As bad as anyone can think that “Liberal Fascism” is going to be, it’s going to be worse.

I hear it’s going to have origami pop-ups.

But will it be podcast?

J. Goldberg likes the idea of the plucky independant US citizen. As a consequence, he takes pleasure into thinking of non-americans as non-plucky and non-independant – some people are like that.

Then Mr Goldberg tries, to the best of his possibilities, to intellectualize his cartoonish ideas, and (that’s the real wonder) gets paid for his idiot article.

I suppose I should try to judge it on its merits, and forget a little the making of the article. But that thing is scraming “rah rah” so loud, I can’t concentrate on anything else.

So I’ll just point and giggle. I’d even argue pointing and giggling is one of the appropriate responses to that kind of -ah- productions.

Luis – I think most historians and political economists would dispute the premise of your puzzle: that Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines began the post-1945 period with similar conditions, pursued similar development strategies, and so forth. Taiwan and the ROK, for example, approached export-led growth differently from one another, let alone from the Philippines.

As aside: as some other commentators have noted, there might be an issue here about how we conceptualize “culture.” Many social scientists distinguish between social and cultural factors, e.g., Simmel’s famous distinction between “form” and “content.” There may be a whole host of non-governmental social relations that vary across cases and matter a great deal for, for example, economic development, but they might have similar effects regardless of the specific meanings attached to them.

“Subsequently though I have changed my thinking. Philippine economic policy changed to a much more export-oriented model, with little effect.”

Yes, it did change. But rather late in the game. This probably matters a great deal, particularly in the context of variation in other conditions.

There is an enormous amount of research into differential educational achievement by immigrant populations in the US. Perhaps one of the sociologists here could better address your question, and how or if it provides evidence of inherent cultural differences that somehow explain Philippines economic performance vis-a-vis the ROK, Taiwan, and contemporary China? I do know that the demographics of Korean immigrants are *very* different from that of Filipino immigrants. I suspect there’s enormous variation in the Chinese population in the US, however, and I do know that scholars have pointed to a variety of social factors to explain the particular place of ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asian economies.

A useful set of comparisons might be with the Jewish population in the United States, which over-performed–and continues to over-perform–other Caucasians. Many point to supposedly inherent aspects of Jewish culture to explain this (and some to genetics), yet this pattern does not hold across time and space in a way that suggests some form of cultural determinism.

“I am most interested in the question of why third world country A’s GDP starts to grow at 10% annually and does so for twenty-thirty years and third world country B, whose physical and social condition, history and institutional structures are not obviously worse grows at perhaps 4% during the same period.”

Luis’s point is exactly on — this is precisely why more and more prominent economists are trying to investigate cultural explanations, and put more theoretical depth into what we mean by “culture”, instead of using it as a catch-all. Last I heard, economists were social scientists, so Henry’s statement that cultural explanations have a “god-awful” reputation among social scientists seems off. One can add to this the whole “social capital” literature, much of which I think *should* have a god-awful reputation but clearly does not among many social scientists. It is not hard to find schools of social science who have been turning more, not less, toward cultural explanations.

There are of course a ton of potential problems with such explanations, but let’s not just scoff at them or write them off. It’s not like non-cultural social science explantions (perhaps those favored by Henry?) have proved themselves to have a lot of explanatory power.

Scoffing at Jonah Goldberg is of course a different matter.

OOPS. I forgot to provide a link to the post in which Klein uses the above-referenced stats. Here it is:

http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/thronekissers.html

Mr. Nexon,

Thank you for the reply. It is a pleasure to discuss substantial matters.

I have heard talk about the Philippines missing the window of opportunity and getting priced out of the manufacturing for export niche by China. I don’t think this is a very useful explanation. Other countries also came late into the game and are doing better.

I do follow the education literature, and I have not noticed anything that gets into the guts of that question. As far as I can tell the mechanics of the effect of culture on educational performance is still a mystery. The best attempt I have seen was Ogbu’s, but he was dealing with black people and his reasearch was not quantitative.

Since this economic effect runs in parallel with the measurable economic outcomes, I thought there must be some connection, or at least there was some light to be shed from one field to another.

I don’t know of any studies on the differences in the demographics of different Asian immigrant groups, if you have such a reference it would be very interesting. From observation of our local populations here in San Francisco, I cannot detect much of a difference. If anything the social background of the local Chinese is if anything lower than what is typical of the local Filipinos.

The Chinese in the Philippines are predominantly the descendants of poor peasants imported as coolie labor. When I was a kid you would still see Chinese pulling rickshaws in Manilas Chinatown, and it was common to find Chinese servants in wealthy households. No more.

Mr. Ball,

I do not see how there can be selection and availability biases in the case of overseas Chinese or Jews.

Chinese are Chinese; they do not and cannot hide as something else. How is a Chinese going to pretend he is a Malay in Malaysia ? Even in the Philippines it doesn’t happen, in spite of considerable intermarriage.

And as for US test scores, the same thing. We do have test data broken down by Chinese and Filipino in California, and these apply to the entire population of students, that is the entire population who are required to take the public school tests. We have SAT data for the entire population of test takers also.

I think the burden is on you to show some plausible evidence of selection bias.

Hmmm…seems like the issue here isn’t really the bleatings of Jonah Goldberg but another bit of flatulence about the relative virtue of ratcho over cultural explanations. I think that this kind of backhand dismissal of culture as explanation can just as readily apply to the pretentious claptrap of ratcho. Ratcho is like so 80s, lots of moussed hair on preppies primed and primped for the synth beats on the dance floor.

Mr. Hay,

That would be an explanation, but that assumes that the population is constantly leaking its failures back to China.

– The path back to China has been blocked for decades at a time.

– The present-day overseas Chinese are mostly third generation or more, and have nothing to go back to.

– The old trope was that one would return to China with a fortune, and be the big man in the village. The failures had more prospects abroad, not in village China.

– Even poor Chinese show signs of high performance. We in San Francisco have such populations that can easily be identified; we have schools with high Chinese enrollment, high ELL (English Language Learners) and high free lunch qualification. Poor Chinese kids, it turns out, are only marginally less able in school than the average Chinese, and of course miles ahead of the general average.

Mr. Ball,

SAT’s are a biased sample indeed, as there can be a difference in the slice of the population that takes the SAT – i.e., if Filipinos are more likely to take the SAT than Chinese the Filipino test-taking pool may be of lower quality.

But that does not seem to be the case, as there is no reason to think that Chinese-Americans take the SAT at a lower rate.

As for the California tests, the vast majority do declare their identity, only 2-3% I believe do not.

One would also have to assume that the Filipino and Chinese populations resident in California are not representative, or differentially representative. Taken in isolation this would be a reasonable objection. But we do have IQ data for various Chinese populations, including Chinese-Americans, and these are very similar. On that scale there is no reason to think that Chinese-Americans are unrepresentative of the Chinese.

Sadly, we do not have IQ scores for Filipino-Americans. But the fact that Chinese outperform them both here and in the old country tends to support the notion that the Fil-American sample is not that far off from the original population.

…explanatory deficiencies are outweighed by their political usefulness in providing a higher justification for selfishness.

“Selfishness.” Interesting word choice, that. In Europe (and to some degree in America), the geezers and grievance lobbies watch as the social welfare system sinks under the weight of its ponzi scheme ridiculousness and, with little more than a shrug, demand healthy COLAs and added benefits. Sure, the whole state is going bankrupt, but who gives a damn – I’ll be dead by then.

If you think about it, socialism is actually about the most selfish system there is.